More cheating with Amazons Mechanical Turk

For those of you who read my previous post ‘The Dangers of Outsourcing’ a story has appeared about how Amazons Mechanical Turk (also known as mturk) been has used to spread false information accross the net.

This time the culprit is a twitter user who wants to win a Shorty Award for ‘The best producers of short socialmedia content in 2008′. Short in this case meaning 140 characters or less on the mircoblogging service Twitter. The person in question has been offering up to $0.48 per vote, each of which requires a unique Twitter account. The posting also said “DO NOT post publically that you are being paid for your work.” which obviously hasn’t worked.

This tactic managed to achieve first place in the polling for a short while until second placed Dan Zarrella recieved an anonymous tip off. After reporting this to the award orginisers some of the nominees votes were discounted in an effort to mitigate the cheating that has gone on.

With two people been caught out on mturk in as many days the best advice is if you thinking about posting false information Don’t do it. The second best is don’t advertised on a public service.

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